Hearing Things
by Lacuna Miyamoto
Summary: It's not really an issue that came up in conversations a lot, but maybe, just maybe, something's wrong with Shawn Spencer.
1. Insanely Expensive

Chapter I; Insanely Expensive

"Hey." Shawn is standing alone in the store, waiting for the manager to come back out of the back, rocking up on the balls of his feet and down again, so he has absolutely no idea who it is that is speaking to him.

"Hey!" Shawn looks around, but all he sees are little dolls. Collectors items. Some of the pieces, they cost upwards of a thousand dollars. It's pure insanity, as far as Shawn's concerned.

"Hey, Shawn Spencer! I am _talking_ to _you_!" Shawn locks on to the doll, a little man dressed like a wander or something else medieval. And he is glaring at him.

"You?"

"Me." The doll confirms, but other than that, it didn't actually move. It has no lips.

"You're a doll."

"Thanks for reminding me." Shawn just shakes his head, baffled. He's never spoken to a doll before, so he isn't really up to date on proper conversational etiquette. Apparently, dolls do not like to be reminded of their dollexistence the same way fat people do not like to be reminded of their extra hips.

"You do know that someone was murdered here, right?"

"It might have crossed my mind."

"Then hop to it, you daisy!"

"H-hop to it? Really? Are you sure that's what you want your first impression to be?" But the doll never answers. The store owner clears his throat. His eyes, peering out from behind a pair of old fashioned wire frame glasses, are narrowed at him.

"Erhem." Shawn says, shuffling his feet.

"I was channeling the maker of the doll. Did you know that he harbored very extreme feelings of love towards furbies? Beastly little creatures."

The store owner's eyes narrow further and his tongue darts out to wet his lips, almost nervously.

"That doll was hand crafted in 1902."

"So you can imagine his problem." Shawn reaches forward to snag the documents, but the owner shuffles back, jerking the papers just out of reach.

"I could get in trouble for handing these over to you."

"I will keep that in mind, Dr. Kebler."

"I'm giving these to you because I trust your results, not your methods. Please stay out of my store, Mr. Spencer." With that, he thrusts the papers into Shawn's hands and doesn't bother to make sure if Shawn has them before he spins and starts to stalk back behind the counter.

"Dr. Kebler, how much does this doll cost?"

Dr. Kebler smirks ruefully and shakes his head.

"Three hundred and fifty, even."

"Woah."

"Woah." He agrees, nodding, a little bit of humor bleeding back into his voice. Shawn smiles and turns around, leaving the store, the little bell above the door tinkling.

He needs a drink. An image of the doll flits through his mind.

And _it's_ _words_.

Preferably a pineapple smoothie with a generous shot of rum.

Mmm. De_licious_.

Shawn does end up solving the murder and the robberies, as if there was any doubt. It was Dr. Kebler's assistant. Dr. Kebler thanks Shawn and gives him the doll that had spoken to him plus the promised reward (minus 350, even).

Shawn shrugs and takes it, smiling the whole time.

He names the doll Daisy. It never talks to him again.


	2. Forced Recreation

Chapter II; Forcing Recreation

"Did you beat Lassiter unconscious so you could give him a back rub?" Gus sounds horrified. But more than anything, exasperated.

"Don't be silly. It's a massage and I drugged him."

"Oh god, what did you give him? How much?"

"Bubbletumblemite is as close as I figure. I can't actually pronounce it. Also, like five."

"Shawn! Shawn, what if you overdosed him! What if he dies!"

"Of course not! It's Lassie!"

"Earth logic, Shawn! What have I told you about using Earth logic!"

"That I need to use it more. But I just find it too constraining. It doesn't properly adhere itself to my day to day needs." Gus doesn't answer, he just stands there and watches Lassiter breath, his eyes narrowed as if gauging how long they have to live. He probably is.

Shawn just keeps on humming and keeps on rubbing and Lassiter keeps on being drugged and unconscious. The detective doesn't seem to be in danger of going into cardiac arrest or waking up anytime soon, so Gus makes an anxious arch around Lassiter and sits at his desk.

"Gus, don't think I don't know you're staring at my ass."

"You're giving Lassiter a massage."

"He needs it!"

"Well, he does need to relax, but he won't be when he wakes up. It's completely pointless."

"Oh pssh. They're roofies. He won't remember a thing."

"That makes me feel so much better."

"I know, that's why I did it."

"Oh no you don't!"

"What?"

"You're the one who decided to drug Lassiter, all on your own!" Gus snaps, standing up and waving his arms around, "You are not making it my fault!"

"But Guuusss…!"

"No buts, Shawn!" And before Shawn can even say anything else, Gus is already on his way to the door. Just before the door closes, Gus sticks his head back inside, glaring.

"I'm going to New Orleans for when Lassiter wakes up. Call me if you're still alive." And he's out the door again.

"Gus. Gus! Gus, you can't go to New Orleans without me! What kind of friend are you!" Shawn pauses, but Gus, stubbornly, does not reenter.

"I'm disappointed in you!" He shouts, but he can hear the blueberry start up and drive away.

"You don't really think he's going to New Orleans, do you?" Shawn asks, leaning forward into Lassiter's ear. But alas, the detective does not answer. So, he pulls back, cracks his spine and keeps on massaging those terrible knots all over Lassiter's back.

"I think your friend has a point." Shawn pauses and leans dangerously to the side to get a good look at Lassiter's face. Still unconscious. Utterly knocked out. Drooling a little bit.

"Friends don't drug friends."

"No, friends don't let friends drive bulldozers ripped on acid. Friends drug friends on a pretty regular basis."

"Whatever you say." The voice goes silent; unconscious Lassie goes silent, but Shawn keeps staring. He's aware that something's not quite right here, but he just can't put his finger on it. So he shrugs and goes back to his massage.

When Lassiter wakes up laying on the sofa in the Psych office, Shawn is upside down on the love seat across from him, red in the face and cross eyed. Lassiter is more confused than angry, but he does have a reputation to uphold.

"What did you do to me?" It's not as angry as he would have liked.

"Nothing," Shawn gasps, "you were… obviously tired. Sat down and…" Shawn snaps his fingers weakly, "BANG. Out like… a light."

"You're going to give yourself brain damage." Lassiter says, unsure if he should believe the psychic or not. Shawn doesn't really acknowledge him, so Lassiter circles around, grabs Shawn by the ankles and shoves. The psychic squalls and folds awkwardly onto the floor, but his head is no longer in danger of exploding.

Shawn doesn't move, he just lays there and stares at Lassiter.

He says: "My hero", but it doesn't sound like sarcasm at all.

Lassiter exits the premises as fast as he can without actually running. He'd never admit it, but Shawn creeps him out, just a little. When he gets into the Crown Vic and looks back at the office, he doesn't see Shawn, but he does see the blinds snap back into place.

He shivers without meaning to and starts up the car.

That night, Lassiter sighs and stretches out across the sofa and he almost melts, that's how much he relaxes.

Lassiter doesn't notice, but it's the most he's relaxed since he knew Victoria was unhappy with their marriage.


	3. Bouncy Things

Chapter III; Bouncy Things

The murder victim is a twelve year old girl and everyone is somber. Even Shawn. He's leaving out the jokes today, out of his little ghost dances and his heart isn't really into it.

It doesn't make Lassiter happy, but it's good to know that Shawn can feel some-what normally.

Gus is sitting across from Shawn, in a chair and they're tossing a rubber band ball the size of a grapefruit back and forth to each other.

Shawn's lips are moving, but he's not talking.

Now, Gus knows. About Shawn. About how when he talks to little plastic army men and missing posters, that they sometimes answer.

He figures, (more like hopes) that they're just manifestations of his thought process. That Shawn is just so smart, that his brain creates auditorial hallucinations, just to deal with thinking.

He tells himself, that's it. And it's normal and it's nothing more than that.

Once or twice, he's asked Shawn what the things say to him, but Shawn just stared at him like he doesn't understand.

So as his friend, it's also Gus' job to keep Shawn safe. To keep it a secret. To keep it a secret that Shawn _isn't_ faking. Once, at night, when he was alone, the thought made him laugh so hard that he started to cry a little.

Only, he didn't think it was all that funny.

Gus throws the ball and Shawn catches it and stares at it and whispers: "That's a _terrible_ idea." Then he's throwing it back and Gus catches it and looks at the ball, but he doesn't see anything and he doesn't hear anything, either. So he throws it back, because it's a creepy ball.

The ball is scaring him, just a little.

When Shawn catches it, instead of saying anything, he steps up onto his chair and raises it above his head.

Lassiter is already staring at Shawn. Gus too.

Shawn wings it at the ground as hard as he can and it's not _that_ bouncy, but it shoots up, just missing his head by a breath and cannonballs into the light fixture on the ceiling, making a terrible racket and cracking the plastic case.

Now everyone is staring at Shawn. He looks around at everybody, as if surprised that they're all staring at him. Like he's forgotten that he'd just called everybody to attention.

Shawn opens his mouth, but closes it again. Instead, he jumps down off of the chair and speeds through the hallway out of the front door. Slowly, shaking their heads, everybody drifts back to their work.

Gus' ears burn when he picks up on some of the things he hears whispered under breath. Most of the time, most of the people here are good natured when it came to Shawn's antics, but sometimes, like now, with all their nerves frayed, they turned vicious, accusing, silently, Shawn of being nothing more than an attention-whoring freak.

When the phone rings and Shawn is on the other line, asking where he is, Gus pretends to be mad, but he isn't, really. Because he's just happy to have a reason to get up and run out the door after him.

When he gets outside, Shawn is waiting for him by the blueberry, bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet. His lips are moving, but he's not saying anything.


	4. Sorta Kinda Accident

Chapter IV; Sorta Kinda Accident.

Shawn's neck and chest are covered in blood. Gus is sitting next to him, squeaking and twitching sporadically, he looks like he's having a fit.

Shawn's eyes, round and wide, are distant.

"He just… exploded." Shawn says, dazed. Gus just twitches. Jenny Jenkins, a girl of about eighteen, short, round and babyfaced, nods her confirmation. She's the client of the latest case. That, literally, had just blown wide open.

"I think this case has just been blown wide open." Shawn says. Gus wails angrily at him. Jenny giggles drunkenly and then sobers suddenly, staring at a chunk of what appeared to be small intestine.

It started with Jenny looking for her brother, Jared, who had- as it turned out, over-seen some kind of half assed robbery take place.

There had been chaos and screaming and half a murder. The culprit had managed to avoid the police, even after the rest of his crew had been arrested. Had bolted and holed himself up inside an old warehouse and had waited, sitting on a box of old dynamite, just like that Steely Dan song.

Jenny had refused to be left behind, because this was the dick that had tried to kill her brother.

Of course, they'd gotten themselves abducted.

But when this guy pulls a stick of TNT out of the box and stares at it, Gus and Shawn and Jenny are all the way away at the other side of the warehouse, all zip tied and tethered to the thick cables running from a breaker box.

Gus and Jenny tuck their heads under their arms as per Shawn's instructions. But Shawn doesn't. He watches their culprit toss the stick back into it's box with a sigh. Then he watches him explode. Even from so far away, they can feel the heat. The glowing cloud is so close and the shockwave tears at them.

It doesn't take ten minutes for them to get rescued and checked out in the waiting ambulance. Every one's fine except for the tinnitus and Shawn having a ruptured ear drum. He complains all the way to the hospital.

On the way home, they stop for popsicles and they get an entire box of rocket pops.

And when they're standing in front of the Psych office and Gus is on his second and Shawn on his third popsicle, Gus asks how he knew that it was all going to explode.

"It was all… dewy. You know… wet." Shawn admits, cramming into his pockets for the keys.

"Sweating?"

"Yeah."

"But if you knew…" Gus asks carefully, "why didn't you stop him?"

Shawn glides the popsicle into his mouth and sucks on it, starring at Gus for what feels like at least two minutes. Then he shrugs.

"I forgot," he finally goes with. Most likely, it's just the least offensive answer. Gus doesn't press the issue and follows his friend silently into the office.

There isn't really anything Shawn can do, that Gus wouldn't in the end, follow him.


	5. Mirror, Mirror

Chapter V: Mirror, Mirror

Howard's there for two whole weeks before Shawn notices him. Two whole weeks before he even has an inkling of an idea. Shawn knows this because Howard tells him.

Shawn's washing what might be marmalade off of his face in the police station bathroom when he hears the knocking for the first time. When he looks up, Howards there, knocking on the glass. A perfect copy of himself, except Shawn's not knocking on the mirror.

Howard doesn't say anything, just rocks back and points both index fingers straight up. Shawn blinks, grabbing blindly for paper towels. And then he's starring up, toweling his face dry, eyes lock onto the square on the ceiling, the vent that isn't venting properly.

Suddenly, suddenly, Shawn knows where the next bomb is going to be.

Shawn humms and thinks about getting a chair, but then thinks it would be a great excuse to get Lassiter to let him sit on his shoulders. No,-Buzz. He'd be Van Spencer, the enthusiastically tall psychic.

He's already forming a plan. He'll tell Buzz that his pet hedgehog is up in the vent Buzz will believe him and then… he'll disarm he bomb and be king of everyone.

He has one hand on the door handle when he turns half back to the mirror and gives Howard a enthusiastic thumbs-up. The returned thumbs-up is lazy and totally smooth, Shawn is jealous. Of course, Howard wasn't about to disarm a bomb and sit on Buzz's shoulders all at once.

But then Buzz is being surprisingly unhelpful. So Shawn has to make due with dragging a chair into the bathroom and making increasingly absurd excuses as to why. And the chair isn't tall enough, so it ends with Shawn standing, with one foot on the granite countertop of the bathroom and one foot perched on the backrest of the chair he's maneuvered into place. He has a pair of nail clippers in one hand and a fist full of wires in the other.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. But Gus is on a taco run, and Jules is interviewing a mother somewhere about something (probably the bombings, Shawn concedes), so he calls Lassie, instead.

"Spencer, aren't you in the station?"

"Yes."

"Then why are you calling me?"

"Lassie. Don't ask stupid questions. It's because I'm disarming a bomb. Thanks for asking, by the way." Shawn scoffed, sounding insulted. Lassiter actually was insulted.

"I DID and you—A bomb?"

"…Yes. And there's a green wire and a gray wire and a yellow and black stripped wire, and I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR THIS ANARCHY OF COLOR, LASSIE. "

Lassiter is THIS close to hyperventilating. Shawn Spencer is standing between the entire police station and death, not to mention that the psychic is clearly fucking around with the goddamn thing.

"Seeing as any number higher than two overwhelms you, you need to back away. I'm getting the Chief, where are you?" Shawn just grunts. Because he can see the nokia attached to the contraption, and fuck, it just flashed, setting off the countdown.

"Bathroom, East side. 3 minutes and 24 seconds."

Shawn can hear hell break loose just outside of the door. He can hear it, but he doesn't really notice it. He's too enchanted by the blinking red digital numbers. They hiss and squeal at him. Sucking him in.

Shawn jumps when the door gets kicked in. He wails, whipping his arms around, his balance shot to hell. It was Lassiter who saves him, lunging forward and gripping his hips, hard, to steady him again.

"Saved! Again! You're getting chocolate chip waffles for this." Lassiter just grunts and slips between Shawn's legs, so the psychic sits more or less comfortably on his shoulders. Together, they're just barely tall enough, but it's better than a wobbling death trap. And more fun.

The numbers blink down.

2: 15.

2: 14.

2: 13.

"What is taking you so long?" Shawn flinches, but steadies himself again.

"It's because you're being stupid." A voice hisses out of the dark. It takes a while, but Shawn realizes that there's nothing up here with him. There's just dark and the dark is talking.

"Man, you gotta be more specific than that."

1: 02

1: 01

1: 00

"Goose… don't you ever pay attention?"

"Almost never." And the dark sighs an exasperated sigh.

"If something isn't where it's supposed to be, than it's somewhere else." And the voice chimes out. Leaving him alone again. Shawn growls. Actually growls.

"Thank you, for being as vague as my fath-" and then it clicks into place. Carefully, ever so very carefully, Shawn rotates the bomb in his hands.

0: 16

0: 15

0: 14

And there, tucked away, painted over with sharpie is a little red wire. It's perfect and devious and so genius. But Shawn cuts the wire with nine seconds to go and it stops. Shawn whoops and knuckle-bumps a shadow just as Lassie starts to dump him on the ground.

"Day officially saved, Lassie-Riddles. Let's get some jerk chicken."

"But Guster is getting tacos right now."

"Even better! Wow! It's almost like I knew this would happen!" Lassiter doesn't stop Shawn, just stares as he walks away, intercepting a panicking Guster and his unmarked paper bad filled full with tortilla and meat and cheese and tomato and salad.

They stand there, enjoying their tacos, even when the bomb squad has to squeeze around them to get to the bathroom. By the time bomb squad leaves, Juliet, Buzz and two other officers have joined them, celebrating their continued existence with Mexican food.

Even Lassiter takes one.

He never does ask Shawn who he'd been talking to.


End file.
